Tuesday, June 20, 2006

Forever the Optimist

We tackled the tub on Saturday before the 3-day-long Father's Day festivities commenced. As always, I hoped the chemical stripper would be a miracle cure, that the paint would cower at the sight of it and yield easily under the might of our scrapers.

As always, things happened a little differently. Darwin bought a "semi-paste" stripper that turned out to be more like a liquid. We had to prop the tub up on a cinder block and a rusty old chair to make it level, so the stripper wouldn't run off. Our first layer of stripper wasn't thick enough, so it barely made a dent in the paint. The next time we poured it on super thick. That - with much vigorous scraping - did the job. Well, most of the job.

The bottom layer of gooey paint is still holding on for dear life. We finally decided to try priming one little spot to see if the paint remnants would show. Yep, they did.

So we've got at least another day of work to go on this beast. We think maybe the wire brush and/or a palm sander will take off the rest or at least get it smooth enough to paint. At this point, I am caring less and less about having a smooth exterior. I just want to get the thing painted so I can move on to something else!

As for the rest of the weekend, we had dinner with Darwin's family on Saturday night, and then Sunday we left for a Lambert Family Pilgrimage to south Alabama. We trekked all over Washington and Mobile counties looking for cemeteries where my ancestors are buried and land my ancestors owned.

We went to Old Escatawpa Cemetery, hidden down a dirt road back in the woods, where my great-great grandfather, great-great-great grandfather, great-great-great grandmother and great-great-great-great grandfather are buried. I was expecting some sort of deep, gut-feeling connection to the place, but it didn't come. I guess seeing their graves doesn't change the fact that we know virtually nothing about that side of the family.

The stories my dad told on the way were more meaningful to me. Like the ones about the great-grandmother I barely knew. She'd buy an old house in Mobile, fix it up, rent out the top floor, then sell it and buy another old house and do the same thing all over again.

Makes me wish I'd taken time to know her before she died a few years ago. We could've had a lot in common.

2 Comments:

My brother has done extensive genealogy work on my family. He has been working on it forever and has an impressive web site with everything laid out. Even with all that, most of still seems like a disconnected history lesson. The only ones I can get any feeling about is my G. G. GM, my G. GM, and my GM and that’s because I inherited many of their things. I can touch something that they used to touch. The rest are just names and dates. I think my brother gets a little irritated at times that I don’t get the same out of it that he does.

Boy, that’s a lot of work on that tub. I wish you well. I don’t think I would have the patience for it. Not to mention the sinuses! I’m sure the end result will be vastly different. Do take pictures so we can see the progress.